Oh the Humanity!

Back when I was a practicing Christian, one of the issues that upset and worried me was all the people who didn't know the right information and perform the right actions so that when they died they would go to heaven. In my case, it was Catholicism and this meant, first and foremost, you needed to be baptized and go through the other sacraments. You needed to believe in the resurrection of Jesus and the special place of Mary and people we call the saints. As a child I was very saddened by all the people I imagine in the jungle in South America, Africa, and Asia who went about their lives without the correct knowledge.

What strikes me now is the arrogance of such thinking. The notion that I was miraculously (heh) born into the correct religion and would live my entire life performing the correct rituals and believing the correct dogma while other people would have horrible lives and die and not be saved is actually quite laughable. Yet, I still encounter people in my daily life who think this way. Yes, they are lucky, they say with a smile, to have the correct information. Some don't even seem particularly worried about spreading their correct knowledge. They don't evangelize or go on missions.

But there are plenty of missionaries trying to sell the trappings of Christianity in other places. I remember hearing one such story when I attended a Baptist church service. I was actually there to hear the premier of a song my husband had composed, but it was very interesting to witness the strangeness of a service that was not a mass. There was lots of music, very little praying, and a nice discussion of a psalm by the preacher. Two missionaries spoke about their experiences in China. I am sure they meant to seem modest and humble in their assessments of their time on the mission. However, their words uncovered their western biases and their misunderstandings about humanity in general and other cultures specifically. They spoke about the Chinese in very broad terms as if you can generalize a billion people of various ethnic backgrounds who inhabit a large territory on the globe. They said that the Chinese felt lost and they really needed Christianity.

Now, I have met many Chinese people through the years. While I note cultural differences between their view of the world and mine, the main thing I see is how they are individuals with varied backgrounds and experiences. Most of the ones I've met follow some kind of godless variety of Daoism or Buddhism. I have met everything from very well-adjusted, happy people to disgruntled people to borderline mental illness people. In other words, people. They are people like anyone else, looking at the world and deciding what place they want to hold, for the most part trying to live good lives - because we know we have this life.

What it comes down to is Christian claims that you can only be a good person with their god and your life can only have meaning and purpose if you accept their god are all very insulting and arrogant. There are not only the people who were once part of that religion and rejected it, there are scads of people in various times and places who were born into another religion or philosophy. It would be one thing if we saw good data supporting such an assertion. The fact of the matter is, Christians are no better than non-Christians and their lives are filled with the same ups and downs as non-Christians. It would be visible if it were otherwise, instead of the various scandals coming out of the various denominations, instead of the prayers for illness.

The main thing is, when you come out of religion, you remove a layer of worry: you stop worrying if drinking a glass of wine or sleeping with a person you find attractive upsets a deity. You start looking at how your actions impact this world and this life because you don't know if there is something after death.